Jerk in the Box

I’m watching my Facebook newsfeed and laughing my ass off, here. This whole Trump for President thing is absolutely hilarious. And it just keeps getting stupider, so it’s like a comedy train wreck that won’t stop sliding down the track in a fountain of shrieking sparks.

It’s like no one realizes that it’s all a bunch of hooey. We all watched the exact same cartoon in 1992 when it was Perot, that other over-the-top sound-byte-spewing rich business guy who got all the way up to a 39% Gallop poll rating before sliding off the map for being too damn crazy. But wow, the weirdest fanatics sure are coming out of the woodwork lately, aren’t they? They’ve apparently been hypnotized by the Fox News fantasy, and are living in their own personal age of miracles. No way to contact them and get them out of that trap. It’s like a cult. The first thing they do is tell you everyone else is wrong, and denounce anyone who produces evidence otherwise as “unbelievers” and therefore “the enemy.” So much for fair and balanced.

It’s sad and ridiculous. But that’s actually a pretty small minority of the country. Fox’s ratings are roughly on par with those of Comedy Central (ironic, much?)… able to generate sufficient ad dollars to stay on the air, but no real competition to the network news services. Being the highest-rated “cable news outlet” isn’t much to brag about since cable news got supplanted by internet news feeds. It’s kinda like being the fastest stage coach at the Indy 500.

Meanwhile Bernie Sanders is right about pretty much everything he says. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his proposed solutions to our problems, but at least he’s got the guts to accurately diagnose those problems and call it like it is.

Of course if you’re a liberal, his platform is everything you would want in a candidate. Nor is he one of the Clintonian “young moderate Democrats” who took over that party in the early 1990’s looking to make deals with the big money interests (and who were kind of sell-outs, as we’ve all seen). Bernie has always been a reactionary hyper-liberal, and has never changed his tune or his spots. Except now, after thirty years of big money conservative influence and “young moderate” roll-overs, pretty much everything Sanders has been saying all along has been proven true. Deregulation DID crash the banks. Foreign wars WERE an expensive mistake. NAFTA DID gut American manufacturing (and is about to be made worse by Obama’s bullshit TPP). Multi-national corporatization and offshoring HAS demolished the tax base and has crushed the American middle class.

The guy is dead-on right about pretty much everything. And he’s not afraid to say it, even in the face of corporate and paid-for politician animosity.

Whether or not he can even get on the ballot is the real issue.

The most perplexing thing to me is how exactly the DNC is planning to rig things and pretend Sanders doesn’t exist so they can confirm Hilary without giving Sanders a chance. Their media blackout isn’t working; social media is spoiling that strategy.

To be honest, I don’t think they HAVE a plan. I think they’re running scared, and the corporations are starting to pressure them to do something.
I seriously fear for Sander’s life. Remember: RFK tried to make a similar populist end run around the corporate industrial complex, and look what they did to him.

Interesting times, these… in the Chinese sense.

Everyone is out there screaming, on both sides, about Unions and Corporations and Government; except none of these is the real problem.

The REAL problem is corruption. It starts in the banks where the money lives, and leeches out from there into corporations, where the unions step in to combat it. Except then it takes over the unions, so the government steps up to resist it. It leeches into the government, which regulates corporations and unions, until government gets bought out and corrupted by the corporations and everything gets deregulated.

That’s where the cycle typically starts over after a series of corporate and government scandals erupt into the public eye, and the backlash inspires a legislative clean up to beat the forces of corruption back.

Except… not this time. The corporations have finally hit on the winning strategy of illegally pressuring the courts— comprised of appointees, NOT elected officials— to slowly issue rulings that grant corporations the same rights as American citizens under the Bill of Rights. That turns practically ANY attempt to regulate corporations into a Constitutional challenge determined by a Supreme Court full of appointees-for-life, which is clearly now functioning mostly-according to the wishes of external corporate interests. Corruption in the SCOTUS is the final stage of American corruption— corruption of a group that is supposed to be sacrosanct, but which has been purchased.

It’s a brilliant strategy, if you want to extend monetary graft into every part of American society and essentially surrender control of the country to rich corporate interests which are accountable to no one.

Power corrupts. Absolute power… well, you know the rest. Corruption kills democratic republics by turning them into plutocratic oligarchies. That’s why I’m afraid for the physical safety of Bernie Sanders over the next 15 months, if his popularity continues to grow.

It is a dangerous thing to be right when everyone else in the room is profiting from being wrong.